It’s a difficult task to understand the mind of a customer and work on improving your retail store experience as a customer’s mind is ever-changing and can be deviated with things and situations that might be beyond your imagination.
One of the issues created by such deviation is shopping cart abandonment. Just like any physical retail store where the customer puts items in his cart and decides not to purchase them at the last moment while shopping online a customer might pick things up for the cart and choose not to buy them at the checkout.
You can implement certain improvements in your online retail business that can omit this abandonment practice by the customer. Following are five ways by which you can reduce a customer’s tendency to abandon the cart after shopping at your website.
Disclosing the buying progress
More than often, lengthy forms during the checkout can be quite annoying and the customer might opt for buying from another side rather than filling up the form that asks for an infinite number of details including address, phone number, email ID, bank account details etc. While it is important to have access to such details without which purchasing won’t be possible, it is always a good idea to let the customer know how many more steps are remaining. You can do it by adding a progress bar in your checkout page through which the customer can keep a track of the remaining steps. Ask your eCommerce designers and developers to work in tandem to create a well-defined progress page that keeps customers informed. Different customization options are available with Magento, CS-Cart, WooCommerce, Shopify, or other frameworks. Hence, it’s important for you to pick your eCommerce development service provider wisely.
Offering multiple payment options
It is quite irritating to complete all the details while doing an online purchasing only to find out at the end that the payment option suitable to you is not available at all. Undoubtedly the customer will immediately abandon the cart and will move on to the next website. As a retailer, it is your responsibility to make sure that all the primary payment options are available at your website so that the customer wouldn’t have to go through all the hassle of making a payment through a mode that is not very comfortable to him.
Provision of guest checkout
Among the many factors that lead to people shopping online, saving time is definitely the topmost of them. Customers don’t want to spend a lot of time lingering over unnecessary activities. Compelling them to make an account with your online store for making any kind of purchase is one of such activities. Hence, you should allow guest checkout on your website so that customers who are not that willing to go through the registration procedure still can shop and buy items from your online store. This way, you can assure a significant reduction in cart abandonment practice.
Trustworthy transaction form
While filling up the transaction form during checkout is compulsory, as a retailer you should understand that you are asking the customer to trust you with his valuable details. Therefore, it is your responsibility to assure the customer that his details would be safe and secure with you. In order to achieve that, you must include security logos at appropriate positions in the form. Also, the logos should be recognizable and familiar with the customer like the ‘Norton Secured’ and ‘MasterCard SecureCode’ logos.
Clarity in costs and refund guarantee
One of the first things a customer looks forward to while shopping online is how much he can trust a website. If the customer is suspicious about the price of the products, he might decide to walk out at the checkout. Therefore, the full disclosure of all costs involved not only gains the customer’s trust but will also let them shop satisfyingly. Another element that plays a pivotal role in less cart abandonment is refund policy. As a retailer, if you offer assured refund of the products within a specific time period, the customer will more likely finish the purchase rather than abandoning the cart.
Hence, solving the shopping cart abandonment puzzle demands collaborative efforts of your eCommerce developers and marketers both. They can’t work in isolation and expect customers to take the right actions.
